![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2eRxaTI:sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “deputychairman …”
I was composing a reply in my head and noticed that @danceswchopstck nailed it before I could get going, so, um, what they said. I am sarcastic as hell but I try to be sarcastic AROUND my kids, not AT them. And sometimes I miss the mark and I need to be a lot more careful about that, so I (truly) appreciate the reminder.
danceswchopstck replied to your post “sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “deputychairman …”
BQ, I don’t think laughing at one’s children when they want things is a supportive parental act, no matter how supportive she may have been in other ways. Those scars are her responsibility, not yours.
Oh, gosh, I think I must not have been explaining it well. I don’t know that Mom was really ever inappropriately harsh with me, from a standpoint of how normal people feel things. It’s only pretty recently that I’ve realized that I definitely have something along the lines of the rejection-sensitive dysphoria that ADHD sufferers get– I absolutely get really inappropriately worked-up over anything that’s perceived to be a negative judgement against me. So my mother’s good-natured teasing, which was fine for all of my sisters and yielded at least two well-adjusted young women (the third one, enh, who knows, she’s mostly fine, she just got her MBA and is mostly okay with her life, she’s just broke all the time and has brain chemistry problems, you can’t really pin that on an upbringing), was like the BURNING FIRE OF A THOUSAND SUNS for me, for no reason anyone could understand and certainly no reason I could articulate, and so I just– repressed the fuck out of myself, being a child who didn’t know better. And I do remember, when I was an adolescent, my mother took some workshops as she was going back into the workforce as a teacher, and did learn something about how some people process feedback super negatively, and she did come and talk to me and say something like “I think you’re wired to feel these things much more intensely than most people and so I’m going to try to be more supportive” but it was pretty much too late by then.
My point is, she was as good about it as a reasonable person can be expected to be, she tried her best with as much information as she had, it wasn’t that she tried to be cruel to me. I just took literally everything much too personally, and instead of working it out, I hid it. And as people, the two of us don’t have super-compatible personalities– we just have different senses of humor and different tastes in almost everything, so there were an awful lot of times that we disagreed over just plain stupid little things.
She and I have a much better relationship now that I don’t live at home and can choose when to see her. I choose to see her often! But she’s not in control of my life, and I’m not poised to overreact to every little thing she says.
And of course, I left her house twenty years ago, it’s not really fair to pin my adult inability to cope with things solely on my mother. That’s just the identifiable root of it, and I don’t really know how to move on from it, so I just sort of muddle through.
Certainly, one should be as kind to one’s children as one can manage, and it’s definitely worth periodically re-evaluating one’s communication style to ensure that nobody’s taking it wrong or absorbing unintended messages, sure. But all you can do is your best, really, and she surely did.
I was composing a reply in my head and noticed that @danceswchopstck nailed it before I could get going, so, um, what they said. I am sarcastic as hell but I try to be sarcastic AROUND my kids, not AT them. And sometimes I miss the mark and I need to be a lot more careful about that, so I (truly) appreciate the reminder.
danceswchopstck replied to your post “sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “deputychairman …”
BQ, I don’t think laughing at one’s children when they want things is a supportive parental act, no matter how supportive she may have been in other ways. Those scars are her responsibility, not yours.
Oh, gosh, I think I must not have been explaining it well. I don’t know that Mom was really ever inappropriately harsh with me, from a standpoint of how normal people feel things. It’s only pretty recently that I’ve realized that I definitely have something along the lines of the rejection-sensitive dysphoria that ADHD sufferers get– I absolutely get really inappropriately worked-up over anything that’s perceived to be a negative judgement against me. So my mother’s good-natured teasing, which was fine for all of my sisters and yielded at least two well-adjusted young women (the third one, enh, who knows, she’s mostly fine, she just got her MBA and is mostly okay with her life, she’s just broke all the time and has brain chemistry problems, you can’t really pin that on an upbringing), was like the BURNING FIRE OF A THOUSAND SUNS for me, for no reason anyone could understand and certainly no reason I could articulate, and so I just– repressed the fuck out of myself, being a child who didn’t know better. And I do remember, when I was an adolescent, my mother took some workshops as she was going back into the workforce as a teacher, and did learn something about how some people process feedback super negatively, and she did come and talk to me and say something like “I think you’re wired to feel these things much more intensely than most people and so I’m going to try to be more supportive” but it was pretty much too late by then.
My point is, she was as good about it as a reasonable person can be expected to be, she tried her best with as much information as she had, it wasn’t that she tried to be cruel to me. I just took literally everything much too personally, and instead of working it out, I hid it. And as people, the two of us don’t have super-compatible personalities– we just have different senses of humor and different tastes in almost everything, so there were an awful lot of times that we disagreed over just plain stupid little things.
She and I have a much better relationship now that I don’t live at home and can choose when to see her. I choose to see her often! But she’s not in control of my life, and I’m not poised to overreact to every little thing she says.
And of course, I left her house twenty years ago, it’s not really fair to pin my adult inability to cope with things solely on my mother. That’s just the identifiable root of it, and I don’t really know how to move on from it, so I just sort of muddle through.
Certainly, one should be as kind to one’s children as one can manage, and it’s definitely worth periodically re-evaluating one’s communication style to ensure that nobody’s taking it wrong or absorbing unintended messages, sure. But all you can do is your best, really, and she surely did.
